Neumatikos

It always struck me as something of a mystery when I was reading Mere Christianity, how often C. S. Lewis would prefix his thoughts on a theological subject with the disclaimer that he wasn’t a theologian or a pastor, so he couldn’t be precisely sure if his take on a topic was exactly right. [...]

Below is the essay I was required to write as part of the application process for the Army Officer Candidate school. The title isn’t mine – it’s part of the guidelines for the essay. Of course I left out certain motivations, such as “to lift up and encourage the saints who are there,” [...]

I continue to be perplexed by the subtleties of the will of God. That’s probably a bad sentence to start on, but the other openers I thought of really weren’t much better.

I’ve just finished reading, at a friend’s request, a book on finding the will of God, and why you shouldn’t. It’s literally [...]

Hello all. Valerie has commissioned me to write a little review of what’s coming up in the next few months, because interesting times are on us, apparently all at once. Usually, I’m not allowed to write up the family news because I get stuck in the theory of it. It’s not my [...]

Please forgive my tone in the next few paragraphs. I’ve been reading Puritan preachers lately, and I think it’s garbled up my syntax a bit. Nevertheless:

It is always the business of the true Church to order the secular government around. It is never the business of the governor to order around the [...]

My meeting with the Mormon evangelists didn’t go all that great yesterday. I don’t mean that anything catastrophic happened, or that my objections were swatted out of the air like so many flies. I still think I have good objections, but my delivery was weak. I stumbled. Frankly, I think I [...]

I have a meeting this afternoon with a couple of Mormon missionaries who stopped by some time last week and asked to talk with me about their, um, gospel. So I’ve been thinking for the last few days about how to get to the heart of the matter with them as quickly as possible. [...]

One of the most powerful college experiences I ever had happened while I was alone in my room, doing homework. I had just come out of a class on poetry in which the basic rules for the sonnet were introduced, and we were told to try our hands at it. As I was [...]

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a mystic. But I’ve discovered that word makes some people, particularly non-charismatic evangelicals, nervous, so let me explain. By “mystic” I mean a person whose devotional life is characterized by intensely affecting spiritual experiences. These experiences may be in the realm of simple theological insight, [...]

Dan Phillips recently started an accidental firestorm when he took it upon himself to criticize modern poetry. In particular, he criticized the poetry recommended by Karsten Piper. I protest that I was not at the center of the storm – I said to myself, “I will not say anything,” but at last the [...]